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Zebulon Pike

Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1779-1813) was a soldier who is best known as an early explorer of the Louisiana Territory. In the late summer of 1805, General James Wilkinson, the governor of the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, sent Pike on the first of two expeditions through the territory, a mission to find the source of the Mississippi River. Although Pike was unable to find the source of the river, he did hold significant talks with various tribes in the regions he passed through. President Jefferson discussed these meetings and their results in an 1808 message to the Senate.1

On his second expedition, Pike was charged with exploring the regions around the Arkansas and Red rivers. After a trek across the Great Plains and through the Rocky Mountains, Pike was captured by Spanish forces after crossing into the territory of New Spain. Pike and his party were subsequently escorted by the Spanish through New Spain and back across the border. While in New Spain, Pike purchased two grizzly bear cubs and had them shipped across country to Thomas Jefferson. Although Pike and Jefferson never met face to face, they did exchange letters in late 1807, in which Jefferson thanked Pike for the two bear cubs. The grizzly bear cubs themselves were soon deemed “too dangerous and troublesome...to keep”2 and were consequently given to the Peale museum in Philadelphia where they were killed.

General Wilkinson’s reasons for sending Pike on his second expedition have been linked to the Aaron Burr conspiracy. However, according to Timothy Kibby, a confidant of Wilkinson, Wilkinson claimed that “Lt Pike himself was as yet ignorant of the nature of his journey.”3 In the years following his second expedition, Pike continued his career as a soldier in addition to publishing a book detailing his accounts and findings on the two western treks in 1810, four years before Lewis and Clark’s contemporary account. Pike was killed at the Battle of York in 1813 at the age of thirty-four.

1. Jefferson to the Senate of the United States. March 29, 1808, in Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America (Washington: Printed by order of the Senate of the United States, 1828- ), 2:76-7.